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Comment by curiousObject | Hacker News Reader

> The establishment of an Indian parliament is demanded, in which the queen shall be represented by a viceroy,

Britain’s monarch was a king, not a queen, from about 1900-1950. Obviously there is some big “temporal leakage” from the training, which is affecting these predictions

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But of course the monarch was a queen for the majority of the 19th century. While there's definitely post-1930 information that made it into the training data, I suspect the reason this happened is that the model is not very sure what year it actually is, and based on various subtle cues can generate text that seems to be situated in a wide range of time periods.

Good point - unless it means Queen Victoria? There would be a lot of training data about her in the time period this covers.

fwiw, asking the model directly, "who is the ruler of England at present?" returns "Queen Victoria is the reigning sovereign of England."

Queen Victoria was direct ruler of India from 1858, and Empress of India from 1876 until 1901, so the "leakage" may not be from the future so much as the contemporaneously recent past. Same reason models get confused about what features work in what versions of software.

(Also, Queen Elizabeth I is the one who granted a royal charter to the East India Company, in 1600 - and that company eventually handed rule of India over to Queen Victoria. So British queens were a major presence in India.)

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